Deja Vu

July 16, 2008

Actually, It’s “Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Tags:

Alaska,

conservation,

natural resources,

oil

“Feds To Sell Controversial Slope Leases,” Anchorage Daily News, July 16, 2008.

The federal government intends to hold a major oil and gas lease sale this fall in portions of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, officials in Washington, D.C., announced today.

The Bureau of Land Management, which acts as landlord for the Indiana-sized reserve on Alaska's North Slope, today issued a "record of decision" spelling out land to be leased.

Much of the NPR-A has been the subject of environmental challenges in court.

"The rapid increase in energy costs facing our nation is driven by a worldwide imbalance in energy supply and demand," Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said. "Developing the NPR-A in an environmentally sound manner will contribute to our domestic oil and natural gas supplies. Together with new production from other offshore and onshore areas, these increased supplies will help stabilize energy costs."

The lease sale in the reserve's northeast and northwest sections could result in development of 8.4 billion barrels of oil as well as trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, the BLM said.


American Experience Interview, by Jerry Landgrebe, PBS, 2006.
In 1968, Jerry Landgrebe was working on the Alaska North Slope as an oil exploration worker; in the ‘70s, he helped build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The following is excerpted from an interview he gave to public television’s American Experience.

All of sudden we were down, I'd say it was well over 8,000 feet. The geologists knew something was looking pretty good by what was coming up out of the hole. The bit was chewing its way down. They have a method of putting a valve on the wellhead and they're able to test the flow and pressure with this valve mechanism. When it came time for that point, everyone was excited. We just took a cat and ripped open a big pond area or pit. They called it a reserve pit and it was dug as deep as you can get in the permafrost. They pushed it out maybe a football width and length -- a big square. So then they began testing that and, lo and behold, they started opening that valve and doing all the readings and there was just no end to it. That crude oil just billowed out into the reserve pit and filled it right up.

“Prudhoe Bay: Dot on Map Changing Oil World,” The New York Times, July 18, 1969.

Prudhoe Bay is a barren, bitter place, not even in the reference books. But since a year ago today it has been a name to change the face of one of the world’s largest industries, international oil.

The changes may be just beginning.

On July 18, 1968, Robert O. Anderson, chairman of the Atlantic Richfield Company, announced: “An oil and gas discovery on the Arctic Slope of Alaska by Atlantic Richfield Company in a joint venture with Humble Oil and Refining Company has been described by a leading industry consultant as potentially one of the largest petroleum accumulations known to the world today.

“The major part of the field appears to lie on a 90,000-acre block of leases in which Atlantic Richfield Company and Humble Oil and Refining Company each owns a 50 per cent working interest.

“Two wells seven miles apart have been drilled to date on this block. The block, in the general area of Prudhoe Bay, is some 390 miles north of Fairbanks and 150 miles southeast of Point Barrow.”

Prudhoe Bay is “the most significant development in the domestic petroleum industry since before World War II,” according to John Lichtblau, director of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation.

Prudhoe Bay has meant, according to Walter J. Levy, an oil economist, that “the center of gravity of oil exploration has begun to shift from the Middle East to the Arctic.”

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